| |
|
There's no justification for hijacking civilian airplane and crashing it into a civilian office tower. I mean, I know what you're saying, the rhetoric (sorry Haus) of calling our enemies 'freedom haters' and 'evil doers' is hypocritical, but the men & women killed that day didn't deserve it.
No, indeed. And the men and women who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq, and who will die when the carpet bombs fall in the next engagement won't deserve it either, and the deaths of each set who don't deserve it will serve to justify the deaths of the next in the minds of one side, while the other sees only unprovoked aggression.
Consider:
...the street had been replaced by a crater; people hundreds of yards from the point of contact left not even their scorched shadows, which the dead at Hiroshima had left. There were pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast; their skin had folded back like parchment. Strange anxieties crowded the mind: I was worried I might step on somebody and disturb the dying. But they were all dead; instead, I slipped on the shank of a water buffalo.
(Pilger, New Rulers)
Carpet bombing leaves a messy residue. It was, incidentally, 'the best and most effective weapon' against certain targets in Afghanistan, according to UK Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon.
The justifications offered for the September 11th attacks are as meaningless to the US as our justifications for the deaths on the Basra Road during the Gulf War.
In the last two days before the ceasefire, American bulldozers were ruthlessly deployed, mostly at night, to bury Iraqis alive in their trenches, including the wounded. Six months later, New York Newsday disclosed that three brigades of the US First Mechanised Infantry Division 'used snow plows mounted on tanks and combat earth movers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive - in more than seventy miles of trenches.' A brigade commander, Anthony Moreno, said 'For all I know, we could have killed thousands.'...
...at least 100,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed. [Schwarzkopf] offered no estimate of civilian casualties.
We don't separate civilians from soldiers when we strike at their infrastructure - we call them 'collateral damage' and 'unavoidable losses'.
The destruction of the WTC was an act of terrible malice and rage, hideous, violent, ghastly, and bloody. It was not, alas, unique, unequalled, unsurpassed, or uncommon for all that. |
|
|
